EN GARDE: Bruce Dickinson, the amateur fencer and home-brewing commercial pilot who has — incidentally — also spent some 40 years as lead singer of the heavy-metal band Iron Maiden, can add best-selling memoirist to his résumé: “What Does This Button Do?” hits the hardcover nonfiction list at No. 10. Reviewing the book in The Times of London, Will Hodgkinson noted that Iron Maiden’s hits “are essentially pop songs, albeit ones with squealing guitars and vocals from a man who sounded as if his testicles were snagged on a fence.” That would be Dickinson, whom Hodgkinson goes on to describe in more detail: “An everyman in Spandex who was at once relatable and fantastical, he perfected a howl of glory while sporting the look of a codpieced medieval knight on a trip to the disco. Stardom was inevitable.”

Dickinson probably wouldn’t mind the knight comparison. “On one occasion,” he writes, discussing his love of swordplay, “I ended up fencing outdoors at the Renaissance Faire in California, amidst a crowd of pointy-hatted wenches and stout gentlemen wearing Elizabethan dress shouting ‘prithee’ in a Californian twang in 100-degree heat. After I cleaned the cow dung off my kit I was presented with a rosette that read ‘For valor.’”

If Dickinson’s sundry interests make him seem like an overcaffeinated gerbil with A.D.H.D., they may also have helped him cope with a certain ambivalence toward his primary career. “I can’t listen to hours of continuous heavy metal,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1987, during the band’s heyday. “It’s O.K. for a while, but then it causes your brain to explode. I want to listen to something else after a while.”

TOUCHÉ: Dickinson isn’t the only one with a thing for fencing. Isabel Allende (her latest, “In the Midst of Winter,” is new at No. 10 in hardcover fiction) told The Globe and Mail last month she would have liked to be Zorro. “He is young, athletic, brave and irreverent,” she said; “he defends the poor and fights for justice; he can use a sword, do magic tricks, dance and probably play the guitar; he is handsome and romantic and I assume he is tireless in bed. In other words: He is the opposite of me.”

ADDED VALUE: The Dilbert creator Scott Adams is No. 5 in advice, how-to and miscellaneous with “Win Bigly,” a sincere paean to President Trump’s salesmanship. In Politico, Virginia Heffernan was skeptical. “If you buy the book now,” she wrote, “I’ll throw in a monthlong migraine absolutely free of charge.”